I am looking for a tool to convert PCL to PDF under AShell. Our system generates all reports in PCL and uses macros in the printers for overlays. I am looking for a way to get these to PDF for a new Web interface we are creating.

We are rewriting our Web Reporting application which currently PCL reports to the web where Swiftview software interprets the PCL code for PC display purposes. This process is costly and unreliable.

My goal is to write a secure but simple web application to allow our clients to pull reports to the web server and have those in PDF format so they can just use their Adobe Reader.

One thing I'm not clear on is what you mean by "allow our clients to pull reports to the web server". I can think of 3 scenarios:

1. Individual client PCs have PCL reports stored on them (perhaps generated and transferred from the A-Shell/UNIX server), and you want to provide a means for the users to upload them to the web server for conversion to PDF and then download them for viewing. Here, you would probably need some kind of web app that can handle the upload operation and pass the file through the converter. (Or, perhaps someone has a PCL-to-PDF converter that can be downloaded from the webserver to the PC to operate there?)

2. The reports on the the application server, and you want users to somehow access them via the web server and convert them to PDFs for viewing. This is a little simpler, since no upload operation is needed. You just need a CGI script to run the conversion, perhaps copying the PDF to some web-accessible spec, and then create a new page with a link to it. You might also just decide to convert every report to PDF and archive them in advance, perhaps copying them to some secure area of your web server, in which case the users can just log in and browse their reports.

3. The reports have not been generated yet when the user requests to view them. In this case, an A-Shell CGI process makes the most sense - it launches an instance of A-Shell to generate the report, convert it to PDF (perhaps via some kind of XCALL HOSTEX call to whatever PCL-to-PDF tool you use), then generate a page that links to it.

As for the best PCL-to-PDF tool, I'm not sure, but I expect we'll hear from someone with a recommendation before too long...

We do exactly what you describe via an inexpensive, but nifty Linux utility called "pcl2pdf". Here's a link to the vendor's site:

Visual Software - PCL2PDF

All of our programs generate PCL reports. Via a DO file, we convert the passed report to PDF format by invoking a host "pcl2pdf" command. Macros are handled by passing the name of a separate file with all macros in it as one of the command line parameters. The resulting PDFs are perfectly compatible with Acrobat Reader.

As an aside, when necessary (eg: to append another PCL file to an existing PDF), we use Ghostscript to convert PDF files back to PCL.

We also use pcl2pdf to convert pcl to pdf. we store pcl files on our ashell server and when requested via the web, pass the pcl file to a php script which executes the pcl2pdf. Another one we are considering going to is swiftview, www.swiftview.com , which has a lot more features.